How the Web Destroys the Quality of Students - Essay Example

The paper describes the educational hazards of the world wide web. Researcher David says that the advent of the internet has led to a depleted quality of the research papers. The author claims that most of the information on the web is actually older than what it claims. This claim of the author is not absolutely correct. Internet is amongst the fastest means of communication that is present today and though the internet does have older information, it also has the most recent repository of papers and journals stored in electronic databases such as EBSCO.

The author claims that the information on the web is mostly written by people whose credibility is difficult to assess. This claim is partially correct. A lot of researchers make use of wikis the information in which is not form a completely trusted source. Still, if taken from appropriate sources such as electronic databases, e-newspapers, or magazines such as economists, the information is from a completely credible source. The author also says that the use of search engines for retrieval of information leads to useful information being missed out.

The scenario has completely changed from the time when this article was written. Today websites such as google use algorithms that make use of a combination of a crawler, an indexer, and a query processor that return the most related and reliable information on the first page (Sherman and Price, 2001). The author says that most of the information on the web is a mere summary and research papers based on these internet pages are nothing but a collection of summaries. This scenario has again changed with time.

Now, we have complete research papers available on the internet. The author says that not students are entirely responsible for this over-dependence on the internet for their research work. Colleges and Schools across the world are investing more heavily in obtaining the most advanced stock of computers and replacing the old books in the library. This move of the colleges is justified as they have to move with the changing times and the future is in these web-based systems. The letter to the editor points out some very genuine reasons for the poor quality of the research paper.

The inability of the students to prepare an acceptable paper is because of the fact that they have never been told how to use a particular source of information and carry out research. The writer of the letter also claims that the web is not a replacement of the existing library; on the other hand, they add to the already existing sources of information. Sharon's point of the advancement of the libraries is a testament to the fast changes in the ways of retrieving information. It has been a long time since the paper was written by David and most of the claims made by him are operating in a completely different context of the world wide web and technological advances.

At the same time, it is also the duty of the teachers to teach students the way to conduct research; teach the students the various ways of using various information sources, and present in a professional manner. In light of these developments, it will be interesting to validate the claim made by David Rothenberg in the present context.